Recently in Virus alert Category

I've never fallen for a phishing scam before. But I did today.

I got one of these "this you???" messages from one of my Twitter followers, clicked it and got what I thought was the Twitter login screen.

It wasn't.

It was a phishing scam that throws up a fake login screen, into which I duitifully typed my Twitter login and password.

I even got a warning screen from Firefox that said "Reported Web Forgery." But the last time I got such a screen (when, for a day or so, every Web site was a "reported forgery," shaking my confidence in the Firefox feature) I again thought it was a false warning, just clicked right through it, and ...

Yes, I was pwned.

I've managed to avoid this sort of thing before. If you look at the URL box before you type in any logins and passwords, you can avoid such things. This time I was busy. Didn't look. Got pwned.

Sorry to all my Twitter followers who got direct messages (DMs in Twitterspeak) from my Twitter account. I've since changed the password, so the damage has been contained. I have more than a few different passwords I use. Now I need to go to all the places I used this particular password and change it there, too. These phishing scams can go further than you might think.

While it's the proverbial cold comfort, I'm far from alone. This sort of thing has been going around big time over the past few days as Twitter users have fallen prey to this attack.

I should be smart enough NOT to click past Firefox's warning screen. The browser tried its best to save me from being an idiot.

I just checked one of the suspect messages and clicked through the screens just to see what I saw before. Yep, the screen looks just like the Twitter sign-in screen, only the URL is not http://twitter.com. Bad! I really shouldn't have fallen for this. But I did.

So if you get a warning from your browser, heed it! And be careful with Twitter, Facebook, or just about any site that requires a login and password.

I just got an honest-to-god virus in my Daily News e-mail -- it looks like an e-mail from Microsoft offering a download of Internet Explorer 7, but if you mouse over the graphic (DO NOT CLICK ON IT). you can see that the link doesn't go to Microsoft but to something with the words "gc-music" in it.

The "sender" (and yes, it is easy to put any address in the "from" field) is admin("at")microsoft.com -- and the subject line is "Internet Explorer 7 Downloads."

Whatever you do, DON'T CLICK ON THE GRAPHIC. For more on the virus, go to this PC World page:

The e-mails carry the subject line "Internet Explorer 7 Downloads" and appear to come from admin@microsoft.com. They include a blue, Microsoft-style graphic offering a download of IE 7 beta 2. Clicking the graphic will download an executable file called IE 7.exe.

The file is actually a new virus called Virus.Win32.Grum.A, and security experts were still analyzing it Friday to see what it does. Sophos PLC said it can spread by e-mailing itself to contacts in a user's address book. The virus tampers with registry files to ensure it gets installed, and it tries to download additional files from the Internet, said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant for Sophos.

Other specifics were unknown yet, but such viruses often install a keystroke logger to steal personal information, and establish a network of infected computers to launch a denial of service attack, Cluley said.

The report also says that this virus is poorly detected by current antivirus programs, and that it affects only Windows users.